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Abstract

Gallant irony in a letter written by Voiture : This letter takes the form of a gallant announcement of death since Voiture tells Mademoiselle de Rambouillet that he has “died owing to (her) absence”. A breach can be seen between the perfect syntactic and textual cohesion of the speech and its lack of coherence: the organisation of information and the use of the conjuncts reveal an overmarking of the cohesion signs, whereas the inconsistencies of modalisation, the reductio ad absurdum and a pragmatic discrepancy prevent speech coherence. In fact, it is only thanks to some seductive irony aiming at attracting the addressee that the speech can find its coherence again as a literary text.